Elsie Porter writes:
My Facebook accout was hacked in February. The hackers used my profile photo and name and sent all my crafting friends messages saying I said, “Check out this link.” That link took them to NASTY Stuff and had a virus as well. My one friend let me know that Facebook put all safety settings back to “everyone” or “friends of friends.” No wonder I got hacked…
Vic’s answer:
Elsie, there are two issues here:
1) Your Facebook account was compromised and used to send malicious links to your friends. You and your friends can avoid falling prey to malicious links in your Facebook News Feed in the future by using Trend Micro™ Titanium™ Maximum Security. This version of Titanium provides a plugin to Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers that will mark the links that show up in your Facebook news feed and Google searches indicating whether the links are safe or dangerous.
2) As for the problem with your Facebook account getting hacked, there is no single solution, so I recommend following these hack proofing techniques:
- Choose hard to guess passwords. See my Fearless Web article on how to do this.
- Verify you’ve chosen a strong password by using Trend Micro’s password checker.
- Change your password every few months. That makes it more difficult to guess.
- Don’t share your password with anyone, even if you trust them completely. You can never be sure whether other folks will be careful with your account.
- Share your personal information with friends only.
If you are unable to recover your account, go to the Facebook Security page to report the problem. On that page Facebook provides several nice tools you can use to get back control of your account.
Got a security question? Ask Vic
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